Introducing Video Robo!

I’m very excited to announce a new website has joined the Martell Broadcasting Systems, Inc. family — http://videorobo.com/ . Although it still needs a few fine tuning, it is ready to go, and I want to talk a little about why I’m so excited about this new site.

One of the things that is most important to me is that my network delivers on the promise to help our creators grow their audiences. It’s pained me that, until a few months ago, we didn’t have any systems in place for promotion — we needed to grow our social presences and email lists further. It’s been a process but we’re at the point the network’s reach can make a noticeable difference.

Two months ago I had a custom script created at http://powerup.tv/channels that allowed me to easily update a list of all channels in our network, adding and removing folks as necessary based on a spreadsheet file. It’s saved me hundreds of hours of time. But I know that isn’t enough, so I’ve been looking into making a dedicated website where all the videos in the network could be easily watched and shared on social networks, or linked to from other websites.

Videorobo.com is part of my vision for having a nearly turnkey process of video discovery and audience generation. It’s one of many content aggregation sites I will be launching in the next 6 months to fulfill our obligation to our YouTube partners.

What makes a site like this work is…

It’s designed to help with the SEO of videos in our network, which otherwise may not have any back-links to them. Having the videos embedded onto our site will automatically boost their relevancy simply because they are now getting linked to, whereas many other videos in the same categories but are not in our network will have zero backlinks to them. So our Partners’ newest videos will rank better simply for being embedded somewhere outside of YouTube.

It is also designed so we can leverage social media profiles, using a content marketing strategy I’ve been employing on https://www.facebook.com/TheRPGFanatic to build audiences and drive traffic from Facebook to videos featured on Castle Fanatica.

The site is also 95% fully automated, so it takes little time and energy to maintain. Video Robo runs a script on its server that scans YouTube channels in our network for their latest videos. When Video Robo finds a new video from one of our Partners, he embeds that video into a new post, along with the links and video description. He categorizes it appropriately based on parameters I set for that channel feed, and then he populates the site with the new video.

I have also setup Stumbleupon, Twitter and Facebook profiles for Video Robo. In a few weeks Video Robo will automatically post videos from the website to his Twitter and Facebook Pages, based on certain parameters that I set, and he will also auto-respond to people who tweet at him asking for certain types of videos to watch. He will suggest videos from our network that meet the requirements other Twitter users ask of him.

Video Robo’s Twitter profile will also watch the Twitter accounts of Partners in our network and retweet any posts they make that include a YouTube video.

I’m really excited about the Video Robo project and hope it will provide a huge amount of value for our creators. We’re still working on finishing the Martell TV app project but Video Robo allows us to start providing promotion right now on the web for our creators.

I also want to thank Deaubrey Devine for drawing the awesome site mascot. Because of your talent Video Robo looks much cooler than I imagined he would be.